It feels like your drowning
by EsmeAliceBella
Summary: with nothing to keep you afloat. Short prompt I was given to explain Bella's life and how/why she struggled to trust Esme & Carlisle before New Moon. AU One shot...


It feels like your drowning, with nothing to keep you afloat.

Bella sighed softly as she looked at the writing task she was given for her literature assignment. She knew the aim was for her to create a story based on that one sentence. But to tell that story she may as well write her life story, for that one sentence could describe her feelings perfectly.

She had known for a long time that she was alone in this world; it began when she was a child and her parents had divorced. Her mother took off into the night with a young Bella in tow, leaving her father depressed and alone in Forks. From that day forward she had been forced to learn how to grow up. Her mother wasn't a bad mother but Bella had to become the adult in that relationship. Her mother didn't have the stability of capability to deal with a six year old daughter. So Isabella had grown up, she taught herself how to cook, pay the bills, do the shopping and care for herself and her mother. She had no idea how to keep this going but she did for she knew no other way to live. Her father was miles away and she was stuck in sunny Arizona She stayed that way for another eleven years, no matter the circumstance she stuck at being a mother. Keeping them both from drowning like they could have.

During those eleven years she watched her mother get many boyfriends, often much younger than her mother was. Often Bella didn't bother to remember their names and they didn't attempt to bother her. At least not until she got older. Eight years in to her torment the boyfriends would begin to notice the fourteen year old who had begun to develop. With her naïve years long gone she noticed the lustful gazes leaving her mother and slowly moving over to her. A fact that left Renee single again often. Bella would never hurt her mother like this; it would be like hurting her baby.

But even if she hadn't risked upsetting her mother she still wouldn't do it, she saw none of them like that and she honestly never liked them that way… or anyway.

Bella had allowed this to continue all the time she was at her mothers, and after each time Renee got dumped she was there to pick up every tiny piece of her mother's heart and stuck them back together with a loving caring nature that only a mother possessed. In that way she had lost her childlike innocence and became her mother's caregiver. She was the mother in the relationship and despite wanting to be the child in their relationship she could no longer go back to the child that she once was.

Not long after Phil had come Bella had realized that he wasn't leaving and that her mother was taking them on the road with Phil's baseball team. So instead of going to go with her 'family' and her 'baby' on the road she went back to her father. Where she once again met a child for her to take in and nurture till they were ready to leave and grow with somebody they loved – till then she was there.

The school year began and she prepared herself for the stares aimed at the 'new girl' of Forks High School. Maybe this time would be different though she sincerely doubted it. People would stare and she would adapt to the stares, fight the shyness that accompanied said stares. She was a fighter and a survivor. Her first day would likely consist of her trying to squash the rumours that always came with being the new girl. She hated it. But her new baby needed her to do this, needed her to be strong again.

Instead of allowing things to hurt her she changed to stay strong. She ignored the stares and rumours and began to blend in to the background again – just another ordinary girl. After a while she blended in, just another brunette in a swarm of students at a lowly school in America.

Of course nothing turns out the way it is supposed to, for anybody. She met the Cullen's and her life slowly began to change again. She felt herself romanticising the idea of being a part of a family like their own unique family.

By talking to the Cullen's and growing closer to them she gained three things that were new to her life – Parents, Siblings and a lover. Each time she spoke to them she slowly found herself being wound up in to a tight web, like a spider catching its flies. No longer could Bella have the control she had so desperately craved and kept, now that scared her. She wanted to be an adult still.

Maybe she was wrong to open up to them, maybe it was dumb. This was the exact reason that she struggled to do this, there were too many what ifs in the situation. What ifs was the thing she had learnt to trust as a parent and only existed to help the cautious parent she had grown up being.

Pretty soon she allowed the small scared little girl to show to her new parents, she had relied on Carlisle to stitch her up on her birthday – after all he had saved her. She would rely on Esme to feed her when she stayed there, and they never let her down.

But even Esme and Carlisle left her in the end, everybody left her.

It feels like your drowning, with nothing to keep you afloat.

This was Bella's life, and she would one day tell it to somebody she loved.


End file.
